3 out of 5

The Meg has a tough time filling up its extra slots.  The more revolving door feel of 2000 AD (being a weekly) seems to give it a bit more flexibility with its non-Dredd entries, but the Meg – upcoming pun intended – has to be a bit judicious.  This 6-month selection has the usual set of interviews and features (which I generally enter into hesitantly but often emerge genuinely intrigued by the history covered or spotlight cast), completes the Rennie / Ezquerra uneven mythological avenger JD tale El Maldito, gives us a three part Wagner / Macneil hunt the terrorist potboiler ‘Terror Rising,’ which nicely sees some character evolution for Judge Beeny, and gives us the stiff but promising opening chapter of the Michael Carroll-scripted, Nick Percival painted ‘The Gyre.’  So nothing mind-blowing on the Dredd front, but the usual reliable entertainment.  Topping the Dredd stuff was Abnett and Winslade’s black and white Lawless entry, concluding in Meg 366 with a bang.

The rest of the Meg suffered, though, with the wandering and somewhat empty feeling Storm Warning – an interesting setup with psych judge Lillian Storm tracking down some haunted artifacts but hampered by a beatless plot construction from Moore / Reppion and emotive art from Tom Foster that nonetheless never attributed a very good sense of environment or space that the intended creeps-tinged tale needed.  Paul Grist’s avenging Demon Nic kept bouncing around between goofy fun and stupidity, and it ended on a less than stupid, poorly scripted note.  It was an odd fit for the Meg, and on the one hand I’m glad they included it so I could finally check out Grist’s writing, but his scripting didn’t seem to lend itself well to the serialized format.  Filling in one of the Dredd-verse slots is a Mike Carroll Demarco P.I. story, which has potential exploring some mutated beasties intrigue, but Yeowell’s simplistic art doesn’t seem to be doing the concept justice.  Lastly, Wyatt and Willsher return for another movie-Dredd tale, Dust, which, as with some of these other stories, has promise but feels a bit too rigid thus far.  I hope it’s given time to explore its Cursed Earth-killers plotline fully.